Is. 11:1-10 Ps.72
Rom. 15:4-13 Matt. 3:1-12
Lectionary Link
The Enlightenment and the rise of privileging of scientific method and discourse resulted in various responses from Christians who have wanted to offer defense for their continuation of having faith within their Christian traditional communities.
The rise of science was both a promise of making human work easier; but as such promise of easier work predominated other ways of expressing important human truths were given secondary truth importance.
Yes, we could have art and music and the textual aesthetics of poetry and prose as well as the textual practice of morals, ethics and jurisprudence, but these kinds of aesthetic and behavioral truths seemed diminished given the success of the scientific method and the industrial consequences.
Christians have made adjustments to the situation, one of which has been scientific schizophrenia. Christians have held to the scientific levitational practices of Elijah and Jesus, while at the same time holding firm to the ground pounding reality of the gravitational theory.
Such schizoidal practices have caused science practitioners to discount people of levitational faith.
Utopian texts are illustrated in our lesson today from Isaiah. It is what I would call utopian discourse. It spins a vision of the end of all predator-prey discord within the created order. All natural enemies within the world suddenly become friends. This is indeed the "living happily ever after" kind of story which we like to read to our children because we want to present stark optimism in conditions which are so far removed from that optimism.
Freud who tried to make psychology a science, described religion in his science as wish fulfillment, and as illusion, which he believed science would give no future to. His book on religion is called The Future of Illusion.
Freud was wrong because illusion has a past and a future. Utopian visions have had a past and they still have a future and they co-exist with science.
People of modern scientific faith discount utopia and artistic texts and images as not the same value as science even as our artistic, yet utopian visions in cinema and art function as valid ways of establishing the direction of ideals in love and justice and recommended human behaviors. They function even when dystopian visions are presented as warnings of the evil possibilities of human life. Such negative vision function to shock us not to become our worst scenario.
Utopian visions and apocalyptic vision in the Bible are true, not because they comport with exactly empirically verifiable conditions, but because they function to establish the direction of the bend of the arc of history toward the conditions love and justice. And as such, they are profoundly true and we need to defend the relevance of their truth value just as much as we affirm the aesthetic values which drive much of our lives of imagination today.
The biblical record is also realistic about why we have such a distant between the utopian vision and life as we know it.
Utopias require utopian people and when we observe human behaviors we find that there is a lack of utopian people, perfect people.
Therefore utopian visions also require visions of superhero persons who can exemplify utopian behaviors and provide the direction for humanity to follow.
With the visions of utopia comes the utopian superheroes, Son of Man, Son of God, A future perfect David from the root of Jesse, A Messiah. Our post-modern society is full of superheroes in their artistic presentation. Science has resulted us in driving superheroes out of religion and into our entertainment.
And what does humanity need when there is no present super hero or utopian person? Humanity needs prophets who call us to our better angels. Prophets state the obvious gap between what is perfect and ideal and our current level of behaviors.
John the Baptist was one such prophet whom we bring into our lectionary each Advent Season. He was one who reminded how bad we are not to bring us to despair; rather he gave to us the path of repentance to let us know that we are perfectible.
Let us in the Advent season accept the direction our perfection toward the Risen Christ, who is always before us as surpassing ourselves in future states. Amen.
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